Maple: Setting up the buckets

Here's where we show-and-tell all the hard work that goes behind that delicious maple syrup you pour over your pancakes! We're hoping for a great maple harvest this year, last year's was a bumper, and hopefully nature will repeat herself. In any event, the action is about to begin. March is maple month. In this area, that's when you typically get the freeze-thaw cycle you need for the sap to run. But before all that, before the sap is even dripping, you have to set the buckets. At least if you're old school like us. So that's what we did today.

First, you find somebody handy with a drill to make a hole in a
good-sized tree. That's Ed's specialty:


Next, you insert a small tap into the drilled hole, and hang a bucket from it. That may sound pretty easy, but bear in mind that you have to carry a whole pile of buckets to follow your driller, they're solid and they're heavy. Plus, you have to carry them in snow.
Luckily, Ethan was up to the task:
(He does in fact have a whole head.
You can blame the photographer.)

Last comes the thankless task of placing the lids on the things. This was my job. They didn't all fit well. Some slide on smoothly--very exciting when you get one of those--others you have to wrestle with and force on like a pair of jeans that used to fit before the holidays came and you gained 5 lbs. You can see how excited I was about it:


In all honesty, though, Ethan and I didn't do much of this. Like the city slickers we are, we didn't roll out of Boston that early, and showed up to this task around 3 p.m, when a lot had been done already. We took Kate and Margie's spots; they did most of the hard work.

Sometimes, when you're out there in the snow, you're
gonna need a fatbike:



That's it for now, we'll be back out to finish the orchard tomorrow!